| Scott Walker – Rosemary Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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bluetapes.tumblr.com/ angel pop #2: Scott 3 Second in a series of Details and Aspects from the Language of the Pop Song It’s sometimes hard to suppress an eye-roll at Scott Walker. And that’s a difficult thing to admit, because he’s really not the enemy. Scott is not just on the side of the angels, his tones are the very breath that keeps the fuckers afloat. But still. Y’know. There are issues here. It’s easy to blame his descendents: the hyper-stylised fop poetry of Brett Anderson, or even late-period Nick Cave. Men using very different but equally fetishised, literature-imported ideas about masculinity as a kind of soft focus filter that makes the ‘everydayness’ of the world seem more beautiful and tragic and doomed and romantic and epiphanic than it does for the rest of us; they live their lives on film and us on video. But a lot of this actually comes from Scott. His vocabulary is equally as limited and nonsense-prone as Brett’s tongue-tied waffling about “nuclear skies” and “hired cars”. In both instances the success of their words bank largely on their delivery rather than their believability. By crushing them with charm and sonority as with Walker, or simply by being sex indestructible like Brett. In both instances their palette has to be purposefully limited to reinforce within the nebulous rhetoric of a pop song the identity of their projection; the Jim Morrison-by way of-Camus antihero which has haunted and plagued the cultivated personas of male songwriters since this album, Scott 3, at least. So I’ll permit myself the (mostly good-natured) eye-roll at Scott detachedly observing from his rented room window “the cellophane streets”, whose lovers are “like a winter night” with eyes that are variously “dark rivers” and “lanterns”, whose memories “pursue… like puddles of rain”, whose love “is an antique song. For children’s carousels.” Because he was there first. And, until Jarvis at least, he did this shit better than anyone else. And because glinting now and again in all the handsome debris of smashed-together metaphor and affectation are some crush-you beautiful lines. It’s Raining Today is a perfect example - its initial description of meeting the “train window girl” who “Smiles through the smoke of my cigarette” doesn’t initially promise anything but more beautiful lies dressed up as dirty real life, but scan back a bit and the actual opening line - “It’s raining today. And I’m just about to forget the train window girl.” - is delicious and cruel, but clever. Freezeframing the point at which the narrator forgets his muse, rather than encounters her is a brilliant poetic device. The ambiguity of the statement - has he finally succeeded in forcing himself to ‘forget’, or has she simply been dissolved into his brain by other, more pressing whims - makes it actually emotional, sad even. “It’s raining today. But once there was summer and you. And dark little rooms. And sleep in late afternoons. Those moments descend on my windowpane.” The forgetting is a nasty conclusion, like a car-crash creeping up on the poet as he ruminates. Not there yet. “I’ve hung around too long. Listenin’ to the old landlady’s hard-luck stories,” he sighs, pulling on his Scott Walker superhero cloak for extra warmth. “You out of me, me out of you. We go like lovers. To replace the empty space. Repeat our dreams to someone new.” Devastation crawls towards the hologram of the train window girl’s memory. There are unwitting assassins on every street corner. “No hang-ups for me. Cause hang-ups need company. The street corner girl’s a trembling leaf. It’s raining today.” The character play in Scott 3 points to obvious antecedents for the likes of Stuart Murdoch and the ‘damaged-girl’ archetype voyeurism of indiepop. There’s Big Louise, “She’s a haunted house. And her windows are broken.” There’s Rosemary, with voices who “scream through your dreams”, spending sullen “Evenings with your mother’s friends. Pregnant eyes, sagging chins. Swollen fingertips. Pour antique cups of tea.” Again, Walker is playing close to the borders of the unintentionally laugh-out-loud. “Look at the photograph. Dream back last summer. Dream back the lips. Of that traveling salesman, Mr Jim.” Mr Jim. “He smelled of miracles. With stained glass whispers. You loved his laughter. You tremble beneath him once again.” Mr Jim who smells of miracles. Good work, Rosemary. Rosemary’s denouement in lesser hands would have been a slap-to-the-forehead of obviousness: a bit of crying at said photograph, maybe a Shangri-La-implied preggernancy. But Walker drags the focus back to the magnificent artifice of his own ego in a superb reveal: “That’s what I want. A new shot at life. But my coat’s too thin. My feet won’t fly.” Across Scott 3, Walker seems to astral-project from the observatory of his bedsit window, floating across the rainscape of Blackpool, or London, or The Isle of Wight, or wherever he was living now. Zooming in on other lonesome rooms and cross-referencing his predicament with that of those rooms’ prisoners. He watches the wind and sees “another dream blowin’ by”, and stalks it dead. It now takes Walker up to six years to complete the lyrics for songs such as Cue from The Drift, which appear on albums arriving up to 11 years apart. As much as the world of Scott’s first four solo albums typify cinematically what Johnny Marr called “that gothic and beautiful gloom that was as much about England in the Sixties as was Day Tripper”, it would have been fascinating to see what that obsessive attention to detail could have wrung out of his most famous era of high-art melodrama. In his recordings now, the Scott persona is absent, his once-knicker-searing croon little more than a haunted house itself. Instead it’s his words which claw scratchmarks into the dense, compressed air of his soundworlds. |
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| Scott Walker – It's Raining Today Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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http://bluetapes.tumblr.com/ angel pop #2: Scott 3 Second in a series of Details and Aspects from the Language of the Pop Song It’s sometimes hard to suppress an eye-roll at Scott Walker. And that’s a difficult thing to admit, because he’s really not the enemy. Scott is not just on the side of the angels, his tones are the very breath that keeps the fuckers afloat. But still. Y’know. There are issues here. It’s easy to blame his descendents: the hyper-stylised fop poetry of Brett Anderson, or even late-period Nick Cave. Men using very different but equally fetishised, literature-imported ideas about masculinity as a kind of soft focus filter that makes the ‘everydayness’ of the world seem more beautiful and tragic and doomed and romantic and epiphanic than it does for the rest of us; they live their lives on film and us on video. But a lot of this actually comes from Scott. His vocabulary is equally as limited and nonsense-prone as Brett’s tongue-tied waffling about “nuclear skies” and “hired cars”. In both instances the success of their words bank largely on their delivery rather than their believability. By crushing them with charm and sonority as with Walker, or simply by being sex indestructible like Brett. In both instances their palette has to be purposefully limited to reinforce within the nebulous rhetoric of a pop song the identity of their projection; the Jim Morrison-by way of-Camus antihero which has haunted and plagued the cultivated personas of male songwriters since this album, Scott 3, at least. So I’ll permit myself the (mostly good-natured) eye-roll at Scott detachedly observing from his rented room window “the cellophane streets”, whose lovers are “like a winter night” with eyes that are variously “dark rivers” and “lanterns”, whose memories “pursue… like puddles of rain”, whose love “is an antique song. For children’s carousels.” Because he was there first. And, until Jarvis at least, he did this shit better than anyone else. And because glinting now and again in all the handsome debris of smashed-together metaphor and affectation are some crush-you beautiful lines. It’s Raining Today is a perfect example - its initial description of meeting the “train window girl” who “Smiles through the smoke of my cigarette” doesn’t initially promise anything but more beautiful lies dressed up as dirty real life, but scan back a bit and the actual opening line - “It’s raining today. And I’m just about to forget the train window girl.” - is delicious and cruel, but clever. Freezeframing the point at which the narrator forgets his muse, rather than encounters her is a brilliant poetic device. The ambiguity of the statement - has he finally succeeded in forcing himself to ‘forget’, or has she simply been dissolved into his brain by other, more pressing whims - makes it actually emotional, sad even. “It’s raining today. But once there was summer and you. And dark little rooms. And sleep in late afternoons. Those moments descend on my windowpane.” The forgetting is a nasty conclusion, like a car-crash creeping up on the poet as he ruminates. Not there yet. “I’ve hung around too long. Listenin’ to the old landlady’s hard-luck stories,” he sighs, pulling on his Scott Walker superhero cloak for extra warmth. “You out of me, me out of you. We go like lovers. To replace the empty space. Repeat our dreams to someone new.” Devastation crawls towards the hologram of the train window girl’s memory. There are unwitting assassins on every street corner. “No hang-ups for me. Cause hang-ups need company. The street corner girl’s a trembling leaf. It’s raining today.” The character play in Scott 3 points to obvious antecedents for the likes of Stuart Murdoch and the ‘damaged-girl’ archetype voyeurism of indiepop. There’s Big Louise, “She’s a haunted house. And her windows are broken.” There’s Rosemary, with voices who “scream through your dreams”, spending sullen “Evenings with your mother’s friends. Pregnant eyes, sagging chins. Swollen fingertips. Pour antique cups of tea.” Again, Walker is playing close to the borders of the unintentionally laugh-out-loud. “Look at the photograph. Dream back last summer. Dream back the lips. Of that traveling salesman, Mr Jim.” Mr Jim. “He smelled of miracles. With stained glass whispers. You loved his laughter. You tremble beneath him once again.” Mr Jim who smells of miracles. Good work, Rosemary. Rosemary’s denouement in lesser hands would have been a slap-to-the-forehead of obviousness: a bit of crying at said photograph, maybe a Shangri-La-implied preggernancy. But Walker drags the focus back to the magnificent artifice of his own ego in a superb reveal: “That’s what I want. A new shot at life. But my coat’s too thin. My feet won’t fly.” Across Scott 3, Walker seems to astral-project from the observatory of his bedsit window, floating across the rainscape of Blackpool, or London, or The Isle of Wight, or wherever he was living now. Zooming in on other lonesome rooms and cross-referencing his predicament with that of those rooms’ prisoners. He watches the wind and sees “another dream blowin’ by”, and stalks it dead. It now takes Walker up to six years to complete the lyrics for songs such as Cue from The Drift, which appear on albums arriving up to 11 years apart. As much as the world of Scott’s first four solo albums typify cinematically what Johnny Marr called “that gothic and beautiful gloom that was as much about England in the Sixties as was Day Tripper”, it would have been fascinating to see what that obsessive attention to detail could have wrung out of his most famous era of high-art melodrama. In his recordings now, the Scott persona is absent, his once-knicker-searing croon little more than a haunted house itself. Instead it’s his words which claw scratchmarks into the dense, compressed air of his soundworlds. |
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| Björk – Pagan Poetry Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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angel pop #1: Vespertine First in a series of notes on lyric details and aspects from the mainstream pop canon. It was written as domestic music, “music for the home”. Its original name was ‘Domestika’, the title track of which was relegated to a B-side, and is the only real point where the writer breaks the spell she is under, delivering instead words that are a hymn to the banal: “Oh boy, where have I put my keys? I’ve looked in my pocket. Behind the newspaper. And underneath the remote control. And I cannot find where I put it again.” Bjork didn’t call her album Domestika, because she felt it would be too obvious, that theme already far too implicit in its small, finest china sounds. ‘Vespertine’ amplifies what she felt was another important aspect of the album. The dictionary definition has it as “pertaining to, or occurring in the evening: vespertine stillness.” or in the context of botany, “opening or expanding in the evening, as certain flowers.” or with zoology, “appearing or flying in the early evening; crepuscular.” What she’s really talking about is sex. The home is the garden of sex, after all. It is where we grow new humans, and blur the boundaries between our shells and others. All definitions of ‘vespertine’ bleed into Bjork’s thinking about sex; about us as dehiscent evening flowers, of crepuscular, curious creatures hunting and smelling each other. Her language links every thought to a physical act. It’s almost sex magic. When she is writing about negotiating another human being, this translates most literally to sex, but even when discussing the more abstract, interpersonal stuff: feelings, thoughts, the rendering of these thoughts in physical expressions becomes almost sexualised. Through her work her body is consistently presented as an interface that can manipulate internal monologues and anxieties with her mouth or fingers, even her womb. “Who would have known? A train of pearls cabin by cabin. Is shot precisely from a mouth. From a mouth of a girl like me. To a boy.” It’s most obvious visual counterpart is the scene from Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9, where, in a flooding tearoom aboard a Japanese whaling vessel, Bjork and Barney lovingly slice at each other with flensing knives in a delicate abstraction of sex. Perhaps it was Barney’s response track. Vespertine is, of course, insatiable with love and other hunger for him. “Through the warmthest cord of care. Your love was sent to me. I’m not sure what to do with it. Or where to put it.” Bjork becomes hyper-literate with longing. “He’s. The beautifullest. Fragilest. Still strong. Dark and divine. And the littleness of his movements. Hides himself.” “Who would have known: miraculous breath. To inhale a beard loaded with courage.” In lyrics omitted from the album she writes of “Having an ocean of desire. Having a hairy desire around the hips. Having eyes that can see in the dark. And too much space between the legs.” Her lover is a thing which hides, can make itself invisible, which nestles into her bosom like an animal. She hibernates, finds sanctuary in the immensity of his his hair and smell, and traces his topography in nature: “A mountain shade. Suggests your shape. I tumble down to my knees. Fill the mouth with snow. The way. It. Melts. I wish. To melts with you.” Cocoon is a relatively straight and unpretentious sexual anecdote: Bjork and Barney making love in sleepy rapture, she eventually waking to find him still inside of her. She doesn’t destroy the moment with floweriness, but instead remarks upon it with classic Bjork-in-speech exclamation point directness: “Gorgeousness!” The detail of the words make the piece magical. There are no cringes. It is hard to write about sex. The only piece of music I can think of which has ever attempted to articulate the same scenario as something profound is Ari Up’s abysmal farewell note, Lazy Slam. Cocoon is juxtaposed though which It’s Not Up To You. There are no lovers here. Just the author. Casting spells to alleviate the sickness. “If you wake up and the day feels a-broken. Just lean into the crack. And it will tremble ever so nicely. Notice. How it sparkles. Down there.” When she writes about boredom and frustration it is almost as though she is making love to it. In the narrative of Vespertine this despondency chases Bjork through the rooms of her too-empty house, stuff spilling out of her and coiling around her in ribbons: “Pedaling through the dark currents in me. I find an accurate copy. A blueprint. Of the pleasure in me. Swirling. Black lilies. Totally ripe.” He doesn’t return until halfway through the album, awakening her from dreams where she loses her voice, which can only be restored by swallowing little glowing lights her mother and son bake for her. Maybe more than about domesticity, and the home as a theatre to the minutiae of love (other flavours of domestic love, such as maternal admiration appear in album b-sides like Mother Heroic), Vespertine is about love and sex and the desperate, unravelling energies that surge within your most sacred of spaces when those chemicals are encountered. Bjork writes about the sublimation of love. Uniquely for pop music, there is no anger in this. She isn’t accusing about the distance either in geography or ideals between her and her lover. Rather than lapsing into neurosis, her feelings become as necessary and strength-lending as food, and she chews herself fat on them. Even in Generous Palmstroke, when her song-voice breaks down, struggling with the syntax and admitting “I am strong in his hands. I am above. Way beyond me. I… con… She’s strong in his hands. She is beyond her. On her own she is human. And she does faults.” The narrative, unsure of which person these most private admissions should be delivered in, carefully encircles the non-word in the lyric by doing so: confess. Harmony Korine wrote one song. Other trivia concerning the lyrics of Vespertine are available from Wikipedia. http://bluetapes.tumblr.com/ |
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| Björk – Hidden Place Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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angel pop #1: Vespertine First in a series of notes on lyric details and aspects from the mainstream pop canon. It was written as domestic music, “music for the home”. Its original name was ‘Domestika’, the title track of which was relegated to a B-side, and is the only real point where the writer breaks the spell she is under, delivering instead words that are a hymn to the banal: “Oh boy, where have I put my keys? I’ve looked in my pocket. Behind the newspaper. And underneath the remote control. And I cannot find where I put it again.” Bjork didn’t call her album Domestika, because she felt it would be too obvious, that theme already far too implicit in its small, finest china sounds. ‘Vespertine’ amplifies what she felt was another important aspect of the album. The dictionary definition has it as “pertaining to, or occurring in the evening: vespertine stillness.” or in the context of botany, “opening or expanding in the evening, as certain flowers.” or with zoology, “appearing or flying in the early evening; crepuscular.” What she’s really talking about is sex. The home is the garden of sex, after all. It is where we grow new humans, and blur the boundaries between our shells and others. All definitions of ‘vespertine’ bleed into Bjork’s thinking about sex; about us as dehiscent evening flowers, of crepuscular, curious creatures hunting and smelling each other. Her language links every thought to a physical act. It’s almost sex magic. When she is writing about negotiating another human being, this translates most literally to sex, but even when discussing the more abstract, interpersonal stuff: feelings, thoughts, the rendering of these thoughts in physical expressions becomes almost sexualised. Through her work her body is consistently presented as an interface that can manipulate internal monologues and anxieties with her mouth or fingers, even her womb. “Who would have known? A train of pearls cabin by cabin. Is shot precisely from a mouth. From a mouth of a girl like me. To a boy.” It’s most obvious visual counterpart is the scene from Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9, where, in a flooding tearoom aboard a Japanese whaling vessel, Bjork and Barney lovingly slice at each other with flensing knives in a delicate abstraction of sex. Perhaps it was Barney’s response track. Vespertine is, of course, insatiable with love and other hunger for him. “Through the warmthest cord of care. Your love was sent to me. I’m not sure what to do with it. Or where to put it.” Bjork becomes hyper-literate with longing. “He’s. The beautifullest. Fragilest. Still strong. Dark and divine. And the littleness of his movements. Hides himself.” “Who would have known: miraculous breath. To inhale a beard loaded with courage.” In lyrics omitted from the album she writes of “Having an ocean of desire. Having a hairy desire around the hips. Having eyes that can see in the dark. And too much space between the legs.” Her lover is a thing which hides, can make itself invisible, which nestles into her bosom like an animal. She hibernates, finds sanctuary in the immensity of his his hair and smell, and traces his topography in nature: “A mountain shade. Suggests your shape. I tumble down to my knees. Fill the mouth with snow. The way. It. Melts. I wish. To melts with you.” Cocoon is a relatively straight and unpretentious sexual anecdote: Bjork and Barney making love in sleepy rapture, she eventually waking to find him still inside of her. She doesn’t destroy the moment with floweriness, but instead remarks upon it with classic Bjork-in-speech exclamation point directness: “Gorgeousness!” The detail of the words make the piece magical. There are no cringes. It is hard to write about sex. The only piece of music I can think of which has ever attempted to articulate the same scenario as something profound is Ari Up’s abysmal farewell note, Lazy Slam. Cocoon is juxtaposed though which It’s Not Up To You. There are no lovers here. Just the author. Casting spells to alleviate the sickness. “If you wake up and the day feels a-broken. Just lean into the crack. And it will tremble ever so nicely. Notice. How it sparkles. Down there.” When she writes about boredom and frustration it is almost as though she is making love to it. In the narrative of Vespertine this despondency chases Bjork through the rooms of her too-empty house, stuff spilling out of her and coiling around her in ribbons: “Pedaling through the dark currents in me. I find an accurate copy. A blueprint. Of the pleasure in me. Swirling. Black lilies. Totally ripe.” He doesn’t return until halfway through the album, awakening her from dreams where she loses her voice, which can only be restored by swallowing little glowing lights her mother and son bake for her. Maybe more than about domesticity, and the home as a theatre to the minutiae of love (other flavours of domestic love, such as maternal admiration appear in album b-sides like Mother Heroic), Vespertine is about love and sex and the desperate, unravelling energies that surge within your most sacred of spaces when those chemicals are encountered. Bjork writes about the sublimation of love. Uniquely for pop music, there is no anger in this. She isn’t accusing about the distance either in geography or ideals between her and her lover. Rather than lapsing into neurosis, her feelings become as necessary and strength-lending as food, and she chews herself fat on them. Even in Generous Palmstroke, when her song-voice breaks down, struggling with the syntax and admitting “I am strong in his hands. I am above. Way beyond me. I… con… She’s strong in his hands. She is beyond her. On her own she is human. And she does faults.” The narrative, unsure of which person these most private admissions should be delivered in, carefully encircles the non-word in the lyric by doing so: confess. Harmony Korine wrote one song. Other trivia concerning the lyrics of Vespertine are available from Wikipedia. http://bluetapes.tumblr.com/ |
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| Björk – Heirloom Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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angel pop #1: Vespertine First in a series of notes on lyric details and aspects from the mainstream pop canon. It was written as domestic music, “music for the home”. Its original name was ‘Domestika’, the title track of which was relegated to a B-side, and is the only real point where the writer breaks the spell she is under, delivering instead words that are a hymn to the banal: “Oh boy, where have I put my keys? I’ve looked in my pocket. Behind the newspaper. And underneath the remote control. And I cannot find where I put it again.” Bjork didn’t call her album Domestika, because she felt it would be too obvious, that theme already far too implicit in its small, finest china sounds. ‘Vespertine’ amplifies what she felt was another important aspect of the album. The dictionary definition has it as “pertaining to, or occurring in the evening: vespertine stillness.” or in the context of botany, “opening or expanding in the evening, as certain flowers.” or with zoology, “appearing or flying in the early evening; crepuscular.” What she’s really talking about is sex. The home is the garden of sex, after all. It is where we grow new humans, and blur the boundaries between our shells and others. All definitions of ‘vespertine’ bleed into Bjork’s thinking about sex; about us as dehiscent evening flowers, of crepuscular, curious creatures hunting and smelling each other. Her language links every thought to a physical act. It’s almost sex magic. When she is writing about negotiating another human being, this translates most literally to sex, but even when discussing the more abstract, interpersonal stuff: feelings, thoughts, the rendering of these thoughts in physical expressions becomes almost sexualised. Through her work her body is consistently presented as an interface that can manipulate internal monologues and anxieties with her mouth or fingers, even her womb. “Who would have known? A train of pearls cabin by cabin. Is shot precisely from a mouth. From a mouth of a girl like me. To a boy.” It’s most obvious visual counterpart is the scene from Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9, where, in a flooding tearoom aboard a Japanese whaling vessel, Bjork and Barney lovingly slice at each other with flensing knives in a delicate abstraction of sex. Perhaps it was Barney’s response track. Vespertine is, of course, insatiable with love and other hunger for him. “Through the warmthest cord of care. Your love was sent to me. I’m not sure what to do with it. Or where to put it.” Bjork becomes hyper-literate with longing. “He’s. The beautifullest. Fragilest. Still strong. Dark and divine. And the littleness of his movements. Hides himself.” “Who would have known: miraculous breath. To inhale a beard loaded with courage.” In lyrics omitted from the album she writes of “Having an ocean of desire. Having a hairy desire around the hips. Having eyes that can see in the dark. And too much space between the legs.” Her lover is a thing which hides, can make itself invisible, which nestles into her bosom like an animal. She hibernates, finds sanctuary in the immensity of his his hair and smell, and traces his topography in nature: “A mountain shade. Suggests your shape. I tumble down to my knees. Fill the mouth with snow. The way. It. Melts. I wish. To melts with you.” Cocoon is a relatively straight and unpretentious sexual anecdote: Bjork and Barney making love in sleepy rapture, she eventually waking to find him still inside of her. She doesn’t destroy the moment with floweriness, but instead remarks upon it with classic Bjork-in-speech exclamation point directness: “Gorgeousness!” The detail of the words make the piece magical. There are no cringes. It is hard to write about sex. The only piece of music I can think of which has ever attempted to articulate the same scenario as something profound is Ari Up’s abysmal farewell note, Lazy Slam. Cocoon is juxtaposed though which It’s Not Up To You. There are no lovers here. Just the author. Casting spells to alleviate the sickness. “If you wake up and the day feels a-broken. Just lean into the crack. And it will tremble ever so nicely. Notice. How it sparkles. Down there.” When she writes about boredom and frustration it is almost as though she is making love to it. In the narrative of Vespertine this despondency chases Bjork through the rooms of her too-empty house, stuff spilling out of her and coiling around her in ribbons: “Pedaling through the dark currents in me. I find an accurate copy. A blueprint. Of the pleasure in me. Swirling. Black lilies. Totally ripe.” He doesn’t return until halfway through the album, awakening her from dreams where she loses her voice, which can only be restored by swallowing little glowing lights her mother and son bake for her. Maybe more than about domesticity, and the home as a theatre to the minutiae of love (other flavours of domestic love, such as maternal admiration appear in album b-sides like Mother Heroic), Vespertine is about love and sex and the desperate, unravelling energies that surge within your most sacred of spaces when those chemicals are encountered. Bjork writes about the sublimation of love. Uniquely for pop music, there is no anger in this. She isn’t accusing about the distance either in geography or ideals between her and her lover. Rather than lapsing into neurosis, her feelings become as necessary and strength-lending as food, and she chews herself fat on them. Even in Generous Palmstroke, when her song-voice breaks down, struggling with the syntax and admitting “I am strong in his hands. I am above. Way beyond me. I… con… She’s strong in his hands. She is beyond her. On her own she is human. And she does faults.” The narrative, unsure of which person these most private admissions should be delivered in, carefully encircles the non-word in the lyric by doing so: confess. Harmony Korine wrote one song. Other trivia concerning the lyrics of Vespertine are available from Wikipedia. http://bluetapes.tumblr.com/ |
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| Björk – Harm Of Will Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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angel pop #1: Vespertine First in a series of notes on lyric details and aspects from the mainstream pop canon. It was written as domestic music, “music for the home”. Its original name was ‘Domestika’, the title track of which was relegated to a B-side, and is the only real point where the writer breaks the spell she is under, delivering instead words that are a hymn to the banal: “Oh boy, where have I put my keys? I’ve looked in my pocket. Behind the newspaper. And underneath the remote control. And I cannot find where I put it again.” Bjork didn’t call her album Domestika, because she felt it would be too obvious, that theme already far too implicit in its small, finest china sounds. ‘Vespertine’ amplifies what she felt was another important aspect of the album. The dictionary definition has it as “pertaining to, or occurring in the evening: vespertine stillness.” or in the context of botany, “opening or expanding in the evening, as certain flowers.” or with zoology, “appearing or flying in the early evening; crepuscular.” What she’s really talking about is sex. The home is the garden of sex, after all. It is where we grow new humans, and blur the boundaries between our shells and others. All definitions of ‘vespertine’ bleed into Bjork’s thinking about sex; about us as dehiscent evening flowers, of crepuscular, curious creatures hunting and smelling each other. Her language links every thought to a physical act. It’s almost sex magic. When she is writing about negotiating another human being, this translates most literally to sex, but even when discussing the more abstract, interpersonal stuff: feelings, thoughts, the rendering of these thoughts in physical expressions becomes almost sexualised. Through her work her body is consistently presented as an interface that can manipulate internal monologues and anxieties with her mouth or fingers, even her womb. “Who would have known? A train of pearls cabin by cabin. Is shot precisely from a mouth. From a mouth of a girl like me. To a boy.” It’s most obvious visual counterpart is the scene from Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9, where, in a flooding tearoom aboard a Japanese whaling vessel, Bjork and Barney lovingly slice at each other with flensing knives in a delicate abstraction of sex. Perhaps it was Barney’s response track. Vespertine is, of course, insatiable with love and other hunger for him. “Through the warmthest cord of care. Your love was sent to me. I’m not sure what to do with it. Or where to put it.” Bjork becomes hyper-literate with longing. “He’s. The beautifullest. Fragilest. Still strong. Dark and divine. And the littleness of his movements. Hides himself.” “Who would have known: miraculous breath. To inhale a beard loaded with courage.” In lyrics omitted from the album she writes of “Having an ocean of desire. Having a hairy desire around the hips. Having eyes that can see in the dark. And too much space between the legs.” Her lover is a thing which hides, can make itself invisible, which nestles into her bosom like an animal. She hibernates, finds sanctuary in the immensity of his his hair and smell, and traces his topography in nature: “A mountain shade. Suggests your shape. I tumble down to my knees. Fill the mouth with snow. The way. It. Melts. I wish. To melts with you.” Cocoon is a relatively straight and unpretentious sexual anecdote: Bjork and Barney making love in sleepy rapture, she eventually waking to find him still inside of her. She doesn’t destroy the moment with floweriness, but instead remarks upon it with classic Bjork-in-speech exclamation point directness: “Gorgeousness!” The detail of the words make the piece magical. There are no cringes. It is hard to write about sex. The only piece of music I can think of which has ever attempted to articulate the same scenario as something profound is Ari Up’s abysmal farewell note, Lazy Slam. Cocoon is juxtaposed though which It’s Not Up To You. There are no lovers here. Just the author. Casting spells to alleviate the sickness. “If you wake up and the day feels a-broken. Just lean into the crack. And it will tremble ever so nicely. Notice. How it sparkles. Down there.” When she writes about boredom and frustration it is almost as though she is making love to it. In the narrative of Vespertine this despondency chases Bjork through the rooms of her too-empty house, stuff spilling out of her and coiling around her in ribbons: “Pedaling through the dark currents in me. I find an accurate copy. A blueprint. Of the pleasure in me. Swirling. Black lilies. Totally ripe.” He doesn’t return until halfway through the album, awakening her from dreams where she loses her voice, which can only be restored by swallowing little glowing lights her mother and son bake for her. Maybe more than about domesticity, and the home as a theatre to the minutiae of love (other flavours of domestic love, such as maternal admiration appear in album b-sides like Mother Heroic), Vespertine is about love and sex and the desperate, unravelling energies that surge within your most sacred of spaces when those chemicals are encountered. Bjork writes about the sublimation of love. Uniquely for pop music, there is no anger in this. She isn’t accusing about the distance either in geography or ideals between her and her lover. Rather than lapsing into neurosis, her feelings become as necessary and strength-lending as food, and she chews herself fat on them. Even in Generous Palmstroke, when her song-voice breaks down, struggling with the syntax and admitting “I am strong in his hands. I am above. Way beyond me. I… con… She’s strong in his hands. She is beyond her. On her own she is human. And she does faults.” The narrative, unsure of which person these most private admissions should be delivered in, carefully encircles the non-word in the lyric by doing so: confess. Harmony Korine wrote one song. Other trivia concerning the lyrics of Vespertine are available from Wikipedia. http://bluetapes.tumblr.com/ |
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| Björk – Generous Palmstroke Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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angel pop #1: Vespertine First in a series of notes on lyric details and aspects from the mainstream pop canon. It was written as domestic music, “music for the home”. Its original name was ‘Domestika’, the title track of which was relegated to a B-side, and is the only real point where the writer breaks the spell she is under, delivering instead words that are a hymn to the banal: “Oh boy, where have I put my keys? I’ve looked in my pocket. Behind the newspaper. And underneath the remote control. And I cannot find where I put it again.” Bjork didn’t call her album Domestika, because she felt it would be too obvious, that theme already far too implicit in its small, finest china sounds. ‘Vespertine’ amplifies what she felt was another important aspect of the album. The dictionary definition has it as “pertaining to, or occurring in the evening: vespertine stillness.” or in the context of botany, “opening or expanding in the evening, as certain flowers.” or with zoology, “appearing or flying in the early evening; crepuscular.” What she’s really talking about is sex. The home is the garden of sex, after all. It is where we grow new humans, and blur the boundaries between our shells and others. All definitions of ‘vespertine’ bleed into Bjork’s thinking about sex; about us as dehiscent evening flowers, of crepuscular, curious creatures hunting and smelling each other. Her language links every thought to a physical act. It’s almost sex magic. When she is writing about negotiating another human being, this translates most literally to sex, but even when discussing the more abstract, interpersonal stuff: feelings, thoughts, the rendering of these thoughts in physical expressions becomes almost sexualised. Through her work her body is consistently presented as an interface that can manipulate internal monologues and anxieties with her mouth or fingers, even her womb. “Who would have known? A train of pearls cabin by cabin. Is shot precisely from a mouth. From a mouth of a girl like me. To a boy.” It’s most obvious visual counterpart is the scene from Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9, where, in a flooding tearoom aboard a Japanese whaling vessel, Bjork and Barney lovingly slice at each other with flensing knives in a delicate abstraction of sex. Perhaps it was Barney’s response track. Vespertine is, of course, insatiable with love and other hunger for him. “Through the warmthest cord of care. Your love was sent to me. I’m not sure what to do with it. Or where to put it.” Bjork becomes hyper-literate with longing. “He’s. The beautifullest. Fragilest. Still strong. Dark and divine. And the littleness of his movements. Hides himself.” “Who would have known: miraculous breath. To inhale a beard loaded with courage.” In lyrics omitted from the album she writes of “Having an ocean of desire. Having a hairy desire around the hips. Having eyes that can see in the dark. And too much space between the legs.” Her lover is a thing which hides, can make itself invisible, which nestles into her bosom like an animal. She hibernates, finds sanctuary in the immensity of his his hair and smell, and traces his topography in nature: “A mountain shade. Suggests your shape. I tumble down to my knees. Fill the mouth with snow. The way. It. Melts. I wish. To melts with you.” Cocoon is a relatively straight and unpretentious sexual anecdote: Bjork and Barney making love in sleepy rapture, she eventually waking to find him still inside of her. She doesn’t destroy the moment with floweriness, but instead remarks upon it with classic Bjork-in-speech exclamation point directness: “Gorgeousness!” The detail of the words make the piece magical. There are no cringes. It is hard to write about sex. The only piece of music I can think of which has ever attempted to articulate the same scenario as something profound is Ari Up’s abysmal farewell note, Lazy Slam. Cocoon is juxtaposed though which It’s Not Up To You. There are no lovers here. Just the author. Casting spells to alleviate the sickness. “If you wake up and the day feels a-broken. Just lean into the crack. And it will tremble ever so nicely. Notice. How it sparkles. Down there.” When she writes about boredom and frustration it is almost as though she is making love to it. In the narrative of Vespertine this despondency chases Bjork through the rooms of her too-empty house, stuff spilling out of her and coiling around her in ribbons: “Pedaling through the dark currents in me. I find an accurate copy. A blueprint. Of the pleasure in me. Swirling. Black lilies. Totally ripe.” He doesn’t return until halfway through the album, awakening her from dreams where she loses her voice, which can only be restored by swallowing little glowing lights her mother and son bake for her. Maybe more than about domesticity, and the home as a theatre to the minutiae of love (other flavours of domestic love, such as maternal admiration appear in album b-sides like Mother Heroic), Vespertine is about love and sex and the desperate, unravelling energies that surge within your most sacred of spaces when those chemicals are encountered. Bjork writes about the sublimation of love. Uniquely for pop music, there is no anger in this. She isn’t accusing about the distance either in geography or ideals between her and her lover. Rather than lapsing into neurosis, her feelings become as necessary and strength-lending as food, and she chews herself fat on them. Even in Generous Palmstroke, when her song-voice breaks down, struggling with the syntax and admitting “I am strong in his hands. I am above. Way beyond me. I… con… She’s strong in his hands. She is beyond her. On her own she is human. And she does faults.” The narrative, unsure of which person these most private admissions should be delivered in, carefully encircles the non-word in the lyric by doing so: confess. Harmony Korine wrote one song. Other trivia concerning the lyrics of Vespertine are available from Wikipedia. http://bluetapes.tumblr.com/ |
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| Björk – Domestica Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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angel pop #1: Vespertine First in a series of notes on lyric details and aspects from the mainstream pop canon. It was written as domestic music, “music for the home”. Its original name was ‘Domestika’, the title track of which was relegated to a B-side, and is the only real point where the writer breaks the spell she is under, delivering instead words that are a hymn to the banal: “Oh boy, where have I put my keys? I’ve looked in my pocket. Behind the newspaper. And underneath the remote control. And I cannot find where I put it again.” Bjork didn’t call her album Domestika, because she felt it would be too obvious, that theme already far too implicit in its small, finest china sounds. ‘Vespertine’ amplifies what she felt was another important aspect of the album. The dictionary definition has it as “pertaining to, or occurring in the evening: vespertine stillness.” or in the context of botany, “opening or expanding in the evening, as certain flowers.” or with zoology, “appearing or flying in the early evening; crepuscular.” What she’s really talking about is sex. The home is the garden of sex, after all. It is where we grow new humans, and blur the boundaries between our shells and others. All definitions of ‘vespertine’ bleed into Bjork’s thinking about sex; about us as dehiscent evening flowers, of crepuscular, curious creatures hunting and smelling each other. Her language links every thought to a physical act. It’s almost sex magic. When she is writing about negotiating another human being, this translates most literally to sex, but even when discussing the more abstract, interpersonal stuff: feelings, thoughts, the rendering of these thoughts in physical expressions becomes almost sexualised. Through her work her body is consistently presented as an interface that can manipulate internal monologues and anxieties with her mouth or fingers, even her womb. “Who would have known? A train of pearls cabin by cabin. Is shot precisely from a mouth. From a mouth of a girl like me. To a boy.” It’s most obvious visual counterpart is the scene from Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9, where, in a flooding tearoom aboard a Japanese whaling vessel, Bjork and Barney lovingly slice at each other with flensing knives in a delicate abstraction of sex. Perhaps it was Barney’s response track. Vespertine is, of course, insatiable with love and other hunger for him. “Through the warmthest cord of care. Your love was sent to me. I’m not sure what to do with it. Or where to put it.” Bjork becomes hyper-literate with longing. “He’s. The beautifullest. Fragilest. Still strong. Dark and divine. And the littleness of his movements. Hides himself.” “Who would have known: miraculous breath. To inhale a beard loaded with courage.” In lyrics omitted from the album she writes of “Having an ocean of desire. Having a hairy desire around the hips. Having eyes that can see in the dark. And too much space between the legs.” Her lover is a thing which hides, can make itself invisible, which nestles into her bosom like an animal. She hibernates, finds sanctuary in the immensity of his his hair and smell, and traces his topography in nature: “A mountain shade. Suggests your shape. I tumble down to my knees. Fill the mouth with snow. The way. It. Melts. I wish. To melts with you.” Cocoon is a relatively straight and unpretentious sexual anecdote: Bjork and Barney making love in sleepy rapture, she eventually waking to find him still inside of her. She doesn’t destroy the moment with floweriness, but instead remarks upon it with classic Bjork-in-speech exclamation point directness: “Gorgeousness!” The detail of the words make the piece magical. There are no cringes. It is hard to write about sex. The only piece of music I can think of which has ever attempted to articulate the same scenario as something profound is Ari Up’s abysmal farewell note, Lazy Slam. Cocoon is juxtaposed though which It’s Not Up To You. There are no lovers here. Just the author. Casting spells to alleviate the sickness. “If you wake up and the day feels a-broken. Just lean into the crack. And it will tremble ever so nicely. Notice. How it sparkles. Down there.” When she writes about boredom and frustration it is almost as though she is making love to it. In the narrative of Vespertine this despondency chases Bjork through the rooms of her too-empty house, stuff spilling out of her and coiling around her in ribbons: “Pedaling through the dark currents in me. I find an accurate copy. A blueprint. Of the pleasure in me. Swirling. Black lilies. Totally ripe.” He doesn’t return until halfway through the album, awakening her from dreams where she loses her voice, which can only be restored by swallowing little glowing lights her mother and son bake for her. Maybe more than about domesticity, and the home as a theatre to the minutiae of love (other flavours of domestic love, such as maternal admiration appear in album b-sides like Mother Heroic), Vespertine is about love and sex and the desperate, unravelling energies that surge within your most sacred of spaces when those chemicals are encountered. Bjork writes about the sublimation of love. Uniquely for pop music, there is no anger in this. She isn’t accusing about the distance either in geography or ideals between her and her lover. Rather than lapsing into neurosis, her feelings become as necessary and strength-lending as food, and she chews herself fat on them. Even in Generous Palmstroke, when her song-voice breaks down, struggling with the syntax and admitting “I am strong in his hands. I am above. Way beyond me. I… con… She’s strong in his hands. She is beyond her. On her own she is human. And she does faults.” The narrative, unsure of which person these most private admissions should be delivered in, carefully encircles the non-word in the lyric by doing so: confess. Harmony Korine wrote one song. Other trivia concerning the lyrics of Vespertine are available from Wikipedia. http://bluetapes.tumblr.com/ |
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| Björk – Cocoon Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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angel pop #1: Vespertine First in a series of notes on lyric details and aspects from the mainstream pop canon. It was written as domestic music, “music for the home”. Its original name was ‘Domestika’, the title track of which was relegated to a B-side, and is the only real point where the writer breaks the spell she is under, delivering instead words that are a hymn to the banal: “Oh boy, where have I put my keys? I’ve looked in my pocket. Behind the newspaper. And underneath the remote control. And I cannot find where I put it again.” Bjork didn’t call her album Domestika, because she felt it would be too obvious, that theme already far too implicit in its small, finest china sounds. ‘Vespertine’ amplifies what she felt was another important aspect of the album. The dictionary definition has it as “pertaining to, or occurring in the evening: vespertine stillness.” or in the context of botany, “opening or expanding in the evening, as certain flowers.” or with zoology, “appearing or flying in the early evening; crepuscular.” What she’s really talking about is sex. The home is the garden of sex, after all. It is where we grow new humans, and blur the boundaries between our shells and others. All definitions of ‘vespertine’ bleed into Bjork’s thinking about sex; about us as dehiscent evening flowers, of crepuscular, curious creatures hunting and smelling each other. Her language links every thought to a physical act. It’s almost sex magic. When she is writing about negotiating another human being, this translates most literally to sex, but even when discussing the more abstract, interpersonal stuff: feelings, thoughts, the rendering of these thoughts in physical expressions becomes almost sexualised. Through her work her body is consistently presented as an interface that can manipulate internal monologues and anxieties with her mouth or fingers, even her womb. “Who would have known? A train of pearls cabin by cabin. Is shot precisely from a mouth. From a mouth of a girl like me. To a boy.” It’s most obvious visual counterpart is the scene from Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9, where, in a flooding tearoom aboard a Japanese whaling vessel, Bjork and Barney lovingly slice at each other with flensing knives in a delicate abstraction of sex. Perhaps it was Barney’s response track. Vespertine is, of course, insatiable with love and other hunger for him. “Through the warmthest cord of care. Your love was sent to me. I’m not sure what to do with it. Or where to put it.” Bjork becomes hyper-literate with longing. “He’s. The beautifullest. Fragilest. Still strong. Dark and divine. And the littleness of his movements. Hides himself.” “Who would have known: miraculous breath. To inhale a beard loaded with courage.” In lyrics omitted from the album she writes of “Having an ocean of desire. Having a hairy desire around the hips. Having eyes that can see in the dark. And too much space between the legs.” Her lover is a thing which hides, can make itself invisible, which nestles into her bosom like an animal. She hibernates, finds sanctuary in the immensity of his his hair and smell, and traces his topography in nature: “A mountain shade. Suggests your shape. I tumble down to my knees. Fill the mouth with snow. The way. It. Melts. I wish. To melts with you.” Cocoon is a relatively straight and unpretentious sexual anecdote: Bjork and Barney making love in sleepy rapture, she eventually waking to find him still inside of her. She doesn’t destroy the moment with floweriness, but instead remarks upon it with classic Bjork-in-speech exclamation point directness: “Gorgeousness!” The detail of the words make the piece magical. There are no cringes. It is hard to write about sex. The only piece of music I can think of which has ever attempted to articulate the same scenario as something profound is Ari Up’s abysmal farewell note, Lazy Slam. Cocoon is juxtaposed though which It’s Not Up To You. There are no lovers here. Just the author. Casting spells to alleviate the sickness. “If you wake up and the day feels a-broken. Just lean into the crack. And it will tremble ever so nicely. Notice. How it sparkles. Down there.” When she writes about boredom and frustration it is almost as though she is making love to it. In the narrative of Vespertine this despondency chases Bjork through the rooms of her too-empty house, stuff spilling out of her and coiling around her in ribbons: “Pedaling through the dark currents in me. I find an accurate copy. A blueprint. Of the pleasure in me. Swirling. Black lilies. Totally ripe.” He doesn’t return until halfway through the album, awakening her from dreams where she loses her voice, which can only be restored by swallowing little glowing lights her mother and son bake for her. Maybe more than about domesticity, and the home as a theatre to the minutiae of love (other flavours of domestic love, such as maternal admiration appear in album b-sides like Mother Heroic), Vespertine is about love and sex and the desperate, unravelling energies that surge within your most sacred of spaces when those chemicals are encountered. Bjork writes about the sublimation of love. Uniquely for pop music, there is no anger in this. She isn’t accusing about the distance either in geography or ideals between her and her lover. Rather than lapsing into neurosis, her feelings become as necessary and strength-lending as food, and she chews herself fat on them. Even in Generous Palmstroke, when her song-voice breaks down, struggling with the syntax and admitting “I am strong in his hands. I am above. Way beyond me. I… con… She’s strong in his hands. She is beyond her. On her own she is human. And she does faults.” The narrative, unsure of which person these most private admissions should be delivered in, carefully encircles the non-word in the lyric by doing so: confess. Harmony Korine wrote one song. Other trivia concerning the lyrics of Vespertine are available from Wikipedia. http://bluetapes.tumblr.com/ |
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| Björk – Aurora Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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angel pop #1: Vespertine First in a series of notes on lyric details and aspects from the mainstream pop canon. It was written as domestic music, “music for the home”. Its original name was ‘Domestika’, the title track of which was relegated to a B-side, and is the only real point where the writer breaks the spell she is under, delivering instead words that are a hymn to the banal: “Oh boy, where have I put my keys? I’ve looked in my pocket. Behind the newspaper. And underneath the remote control. And I cannot find where I put it again.” Bjork didn’t call her album Domestika, because she felt it would be too obvious, that theme already far too implicit in its small, finest china sounds. ‘Vespertine’ amplifies what she felt was another important aspect of the album. The dictionary definition has it as “pertaining to, or occurring in the evening: vespertine stillness.” or in the context of botany, “opening or expanding in the evening, as certain flowers.” or with zoology, “appearing or flying in the early evening; crepuscular.” What she’s really talking about is sex. The home is the garden of sex, after all. It is where we grow new humans, and blur the boundaries between our shells and others. All definitions of ‘vespertine’ bleed into Bjork’s thinking about sex; about us as dehiscent evening flowers, of crepuscular, curious creatures hunting and smelling each other. Her language links every thought to a physical act. It’s almost sex magic. When she is writing about negotiating another human being, this translates most literally to sex, but even when discussing the more abstract, interpersonal stuff: feelings, thoughts, the rendering of these thoughts in physical expressions becomes almost sexualised. Through her work her body is consistently presented as an interface that can manipulate internal monologues and anxieties with her mouth or fingers, even her womb. “Who would have known? A train of pearls cabin by cabin. Is shot precisely from a mouth. From a mouth of a girl like me. To a boy.” It’s most obvious visual counterpart is the scene from Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9, where, in a flooding tearoom aboard a Japanese whaling vessel, Bjork and Barney lovingly slice at each other with flensing knives in a delicate abstraction of sex. Perhaps it was Barney’s response track. Vespertine is, of course, insatiable with love and other hunger for him. “Through the warmthest cord of care. Your love was sent to me. I’m not sure what to do with it. Or where to put it.” Bjork becomes hyper-literate with longing. “He’s. The beautifullest. Fragilest. Still strong. Dark and divine. And the littleness of his movements. Hides himself.” “Who would have known: miraculous breath. To inhale a beard loaded with courage.” In lyrics omitted from the album she writes of “Having an ocean of desire. Having a hairy desire around the hips. Having eyes that can see in the dark. And too much space between the legs.” Her lover is a thing which hides, can make itself invisible, which nestles into her bosom like an animal. She hibernates, finds sanctuary in the immensity of his his hair and smell, and traces his topography in nature: “A mountain shade. Suggests your shape. I tumble down to my knees. Fill the mouth with snow. The way. It. Melts. I wish. To melts with you.” Cocoon is a relatively straight and unpretentious sexual anecdote: Bjork and Barney making love in sleepy rapture, she eventually waking to find him still inside of her. She doesn’t destroy the moment with floweriness, but instead remarks upon it with classic Bjork-in-speech exclamation point directness: “Gorgeousness!” The detail of the words make the piece magical. There are no cringes. It is hard to write about sex. The only piece of music I can think of which has ever attempted to articulate the same scenario as something profound is Ari Up’s abysmal farewell note, Lazy Slam. Cocoon is juxtaposed though which It’s Not Up To You. There are no lovers here. Just the author. Casting spells to alleviate the sickness. “If you wake up and the day feels a-broken. Just lean into the crack. And it will tremble ever so nicely. Notice. How it sparkles. Down there.” When she writes about boredom and frustration it is almost as though she is making love to it. In the narrative of Vespertine this despondency chases Bjork through the rooms of her too-empty house, stuff spilling out of her and coiling around her in ribbons: “Pedaling through the dark currents in me. I find an accurate copy. A blueprint. Of the pleasure in me. Swirling. Black lilies. Totally ripe.” He doesn’t return until halfway through the album, awakening her from dreams where she loses her voice, which can only be restored by swallowing little glowing lights her mother and son bake for her. Maybe more than about domesticity, and the home as a theatre to the minutiae of love (other flavours of domestic love, such as maternal admiration appear in album b-sides like Mother Heroic), Vespertine is about love and sex and the desperate, unravelling energies that surge within your most sacred of spaces when those chemicals are encountered. Bjork writes about the sublimation of love. Uniquely for pop music, there is no anger in this. She isn’t accusing about the distance either in geography or ideals between her and her lover. Rather than lapsing into neurosis, her feelings become as necessary and strength-lending as food, and she chews herself fat on them. Even in Generous Palmstroke, when her song-voice breaks down, struggling with the syntax and admitting “I am strong in his hands. I am above. Way beyond me. I… con… She’s strong in his hands. She is beyond her. On her own she is human. And she does faults.” The narrative, unsure of which person these most private admissions should be delivered in, carefully encircles the non-word in the lyric by doing so: confess. Harmony Korine wrote one song. Other trivia concerning the lyrics of Vespertine are available from Wikipedia. http://bluetapes.tumblr.com/ |
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| Björk – An Echo, A Stain Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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angel pop #1: Vespertine First in a series of notes on lyric details and aspects from the mainstream pop canon. It was written as domestic music, “music for the home”. Its original name was ‘Domestika’, the title track of which was relegated to a B-side, and is the only real point where the writer breaks the spell she is under, delivering instead words that are a hymn to the banal: “Oh boy, where have I put my keys? I’ve looked in my pocket. Behind the newspaper. And underneath the remote control. And I cannot find where I put it again.” Bjork didn’t call her album Domestika, because she felt it would be too obvious, that theme already far too implicit in its small, finest china sounds. ‘Vespertine’ amplifies what she felt was another important aspect of the album. The dictionary definition has it as “pertaining to, or occurring in the evening: vespertine stillness.” or in the context of botany, “opening or expanding in the evening, as certain flowers.” or with zoology, “appearing or flying in the early evening; crepuscular.” What she’s really talking about is sex. The home is the garden of sex, after all. It is where we grow new humans, and blur the boundaries between our shells and others. All definitions of ‘vespertine’ bleed into Bjork’s thinking about sex; about us as dehiscent evening flowers, of crepuscular, curious creatures hunting and smelling each other. Her language links every thought to a physical act. It’s almost sex magic. When she is writing about negotiating another human being, this translates most literally to sex, but even when discussing the more abstract, interpersonal stuff: feelings, thoughts, the rendering of these thoughts in physical expressions becomes almost sexualised. Through her work her body is consistently presented as an interface that can manipulate internal monologues and anxieties with her mouth or fingers, even her womb. “Who would have known? A train of pearls cabin by cabin. Is shot precisely from a mouth. From a mouth of a girl like me. To a boy.” It’s most obvious visual counterpart is the scene from Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9, where, in a flooding tearoom aboard a Japanese whaling vessel, Bjork and Barney lovingly slice at each other with flensing knives in a delicate abstraction of sex. Perhaps it was Barney’s response track. Vespertine is, of course, insatiable with love and other hunger for him. “Through the warmthest cord of care. Your love was sent to me. I’m not sure what to do with it. Or where to put it.” Bjork becomes hyper-literate with longing. “He’s. The beautifullest. Fragilest. Still strong. Dark and divine. And the littleness of his movements. Hides himself.” “Who would have known: miraculous breath. To inhale a beard loaded with courage.” In lyrics omitted from the album she writes of “Having an ocean of desire. Having a hairy desire around the hips. Having eyes that can see in the dark. And too much space between the legs.” Her lover is a thing which hides, can make itself invisible, which nestles into her bosom like an animal. She hibernates, finds sanctuary in the immensity of his his hair and smell, and traces his topography in nature: “A mountain shade. Suggests your shape. I tumble down to my knees. Fill the mouth with snow. The way. It. Melts. I wish. To melts with you.” Cocoon is a relatively straight and unpretentious sexual anecdote: Bjork and Barney making love in sleepy rapture, she eventually waking to find him still inside of her. She doesn’t destroy the moment with floweriness, but instead remarks upon it with classic Bjork-in-speech exclamation point directness: “Gorgeousness!” The detail of the words make the piece magical. There are no cringes. It is hard to write about sex. The only piece of music I can think of which has ever attempted to articulate the same scenario as something profound is Ari Up’s abysmal farewell note, Lazy Slam. Cocoon is juxtaposed though which It’s Not Up To You. There are no lovers here. Just the author. Casting spells to alleviate the sickness. “If you wake up and the day feels a-broken. Just lean into the crack. And it will tremble ever so nicely. Notice. How it sparkles. Down there.” When she writes about boredom and frustration it is almost as though she is making love to it. In the narrative of Vespertine this despondency chases Bjork through the rooms of her too-empty house, stuff spilling out of her and coiling around her in ribbons: “Pedaling through the dark currents in me. I find an accurate copy. A blueprint. Of the pleasure in me. Swirling. Black lilies. Totally ripe.” He doesn’t return until halfway through the album, awakening her from dreams where she loses her voice, which can only be restored by swallowing little glowing lights her mother and son bake for her. Maybe more than about domesticity, and the home as a theatre to the minutiae of love (other flavours of domestic love, such as maternal admiration appear in album b-sides like Mother Heroic), Vespertine is about love and sex and the desperate, unravelling energies that surge within your most sacred of spaces when those chemicals are encountered. Bjork writes about the sublimation of love. Uniquely for pop music, there is no anger in this. She isn’t accusing about the distance either in geography or ideals between her and her lover. Rather than lapsing into neurosis, her feelings become as necessary and strength-lending as food, and she chews herself fat on them. Even in Generous Palmstroke, when her song-voice breaks down, struggling with the syntax and admitting “I am strong in his hands. I am above. Way beyond me. I… con… She’s strong in his hands. She is beyond her. On her own she is human. And she does faults.” The narrative, unsure of which person these most private admissions should be delivered in, carefully encircles the non-word in the lyric by doing so: confess. Harmony Korine wrote one song. Other trivia concerning the lyrics of Vespertine are available from Wikipedia. http://bluetapes.tumblr.com/ |
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